Moment of Inertia
by Ace of Gallifrey
Summary: Rory leaves. Jess is devastated. In true Danes/Mariano form, he turns his pain into action. It's too late for him... but maybe, just maybe, he can save someone else from repeating his mistakes. JavaJunkie and a mix of Rogan and Lit. Rating for language.
1. Freezing Steel

**Title-** Moment of Inertia**  
>CharactersPairings-** Java, background Rogan, a touch of Lit (haven't quite decided how much, yet, it might just be implied or we might actually Go There)**  
>Rating-<strong> T for lang**  
>Summary-<strong> Rory leaves. Jess is devastated. In true Danes/Mariano form, he turns his pain into action. It's too late for him... but maybe, just maybe, he can save someone else from repeating his mistakes.

**A/N-** Despite the summary, this is not a Jess-centric story. He's going to be playing a pivotal role in the beginning and his presence is definitely going to be felt strongly at different times throughout the story, but this is my stab at fixing L&L... and not the April Thing, but the underlying problem that was highlighted by the April Thing_. _So yeah. Jess is around, but he's not my focus here.

Anyway, I should warn you that I'm currently struggling with writer's block, so do not expect regular updates on this or _any_ of my stories. I'll do my best, but college is the focus for me right now (as it should be), and the words just aren't flowing too well (though they definitely are coming easier for this story than they are for, say, The Phoenix).

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><p><em>1. Freezing Steel<em>

_That_, Jess thought sluggishly, _was not at _all_ how he had expected this night to go._

Really, when he had sent her the invitation, he hadn't expected anything. He figured he could consider himself lucky if Rory even turned up for the open house. She had, and he'd been overjoyed. That had been plenty. Being on friendly terms was enough, he decided. He could be Rory's friend. Yes, there were still feelings there (probably a lot more than _feelings_, if he was honest with himself), but hadn't there always been? When he had seen her standing in the doorway of Truncheon Books & Printing, Inc., he had known that it wasn't necessary to push for anything more. The thing was, he was in a good place, and he wasn't really interested in doing anything to upset that just now.

He had finally gotten himself together... and not just "together" the way he was before his flight from Stars Hollow, a bunch of mismatched pieces held together with string and masking tape and nicotine, but really _right_ at last. Writing _The Subsect_ and the other book, the one he wouldn't let Chris and Matt publish, had helped him come to terms with himself and his life in a way that no psychiatrist could have. He had purged himself of his sins, found ways to forgive himself, and Jimmy, and even Liz, for everything that had happened. All he had really needed, after that, was forgiveness from the two people he had wronged even more than he had hurt himself.

Luke had been easy. Despite their differences over the years, Jess had always known, deep down, that the pair of them were cut from the same cloth. They had never really needed to say much to understand each other, because they were just variations on the same theme. As a teenager, Jess had resented the fact that Luke seemed to be able to get inside his head so easily, but now he was just glad that he had that connection. Luke was like a father to him, the only _real_ father Jess had ever had, and when he was in Connecticut peddling _The Subsect_ to any bookstore that would stock it, Jess had made sure his uncle knew that.

Rory, on the other hand, was a more difficult schism to repair. What he had done to her was no worse than what he had done to Luke, but at the time he had felt much more remorse over it, and much more pain had passed between them since.

In a twisted way, it had actually helped that she was so messed up when he finally encountered her again. For years, he had held her on an untouchable pedestal in his memory (which in retrospect, he found strange because he had never done so when she was actually present before him). Seeing her broken, lost, living a life that obviously wasn't meant for her, with a boyfriend obviously wrong for her and an absolutely laughable wardrobe was jarring, but it was a kind of jarring that he now suspected he had really needed. Being reminded that he wasn't the only one capable of making monumental mistakes was unexpectedly comforting. It had angered him to see her betraying herself- she, who had always sung the praises of being authentic- but it had also finally helped him to find peace with everything that had happened between them.

Unfortunately, he was now suspecting that that peace was more fragile than he'd realized.

How the hell had this even happened? Not more than five hours ago, he had been quite sure that he would be fine with just being Rory's friend, and now he felt devastated as he heard her car starting up outside, preparing to drive away from him. Idly, he rubbed his lips dazedly. He was sure that if he licked them, they would bear the flavor of her lip gloss. Had it really been three years since he had kissed her? It didn't seem like it. She still kissed the same way.

He hated this feeling. It wasn't as powerful as the keening agony he had felt when he had heard her voice on the phone all those years ago, bidding him a bitter goodbye from across the continent, but it was the same kind of feeling. The same sharp point of pain that wouldn't let him settle, standing somewhere between claustrophobia and heartbreak. He'd thought he was done with it. Apparently not. His first impulse was to go upstairs, grab Matthew's bottle of gin, and go to town, but he resisted acting on it. His childhood was a great example of why alcohol was not the answer, even temporarily. He had no intentions of being his mother's son.

Seriously, how the _hell_ had this happened? He began replaying the time he had spent with Rory starting with the moment she had walked in the door.

Hellos, nothing special. Maybe a little awkward, but only from the same kind of friendly nerves that usually anticipated any meeting between them. Nothing out of the ordinary. A quick tour of the place, all pretty standard, neither had said anything to change the atmosphere. Talking to Luke and April... well, _that_ had been a little weird, but not because of Rory...

Lightning struck.

Jess's eyes widened as the content of that conversation played back in his head. Little things that had been said, things that he had only half-heard, things that had been vaguely bothering him in the back of his mind for the past few hours while he was focused on other things, suddenly fell into place and he started seeing connections that terrified him. Jess was smart enough to recognize a train wreck in the making when he saw it, and he had enough experience to know that from the inside it could be very hard to see the inevitable coming.

From the outside, though, he knew something was wrong. And Jess had a funny feeling that he could guess part of it. He ran to his desk, currently shoved back in a corner to make room for the stupid refreshment table, and grabbed the receiver on the ridiculous, 90's-era desk phone. He quickly dialed Matthew's cell.

_"Hey, man... yeah, no, I'm not gonna be catching up to you tonight after all... What? No, she's gone. I just have some stuff I gotta take care of, okay? Yeah. Yeah. Right, I know. See you later."_

He ended the call and sat down on the edge of the desk, pulling out a phone book and flipping to the yellow pages...


	2. Flashing Neon Signs

**A/N-** My muse is dead or dying (I promise I'll bring her back to life like Tinkerbell eventually, but right now I just don't have it in me). Plus, y'know... trainee opera singer and all that (music is what I was made for, but _damn_ is it draining). Thank god for month-long holidays!

And oh my god, Jess would _not_ shut _up_ in this chapter! It's amazing how much that boy talks when he actually has something to say... and how much of a potty mouth he has when he's not in the best of moods.

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><p><em>2. Flashing Neon Signs<em>

It took twenty minutes to go through every hotel in the Philadelphia directory until he finally tracked down the one hosting the New England Middle School Mathletes regional finals. It took half an hour to drive across the city to said hotel. It took fifteen minutes of badgering the blonde behind the reception desk to ferret out the information that the team from Martin Van Buren Middle School (God only knew how he'd managed to remember that name) was occupying the sixth floor. No matter what he said, the girl flat-out refused to give him Luke's exact room number, but she was very free with a warning that if he caused any trouble, she wouldn't hesitate to call the police. It took him five minutes of climbing the stairs (he was too wound up for the elevator) to reach the sixth floor.

One hour and ten minutes total it took to get from that one moment of terrifying clarity to standing on the sixth floor trying to guess which door his uncle was hiding behind (he was more than a little pissed that Luke had turned off his cell phone, because that time could have been cut in half). One hour and ten minutes, and the whole time, Jess's mind was whirring.

His head was full of the briefest of moments in the conversation between Rory and himself from earlier in the day. At the time, he had been too busy enjoying her company to really pay it much heed, but now the words they had exchanged were playing over and over in his head, driving this panicky flight to find Luke...

_"So what's the deal with that?" Jess asked, nodding in the direction of the door, where Luke and April had just disappeared._

_Rory looked that way as well, her expression faraway and a her brow furrowed with concern. "I really don't know," she said musingly. "I guess I'm just trying to stay out of it, you know? If Mom's not gonna really be involved, I shouldn't be."_

_Her tone caught his attention. "Is everything okay there?" he asked pointedly._

_She shrugged. "I guess. I mean, like I said, it's not really my place."_

_"Yeah, maybe," he said, not really believing it for a minute, not when she still had that look of worry and hurt in her eyes. "Your mom's not really okay with this, is she? What, does she hate the kid or something?" _

_He kind of doubted that. He'd only spoken to April for about five minutes total, but he could tell that she was a likeable kid. Not annoying or loud or anything. And while he and Lorelai had their differences- oh boy was _that_ an understatement- she never struck him as the type to carry a grudge against a kid just because her existence was a little inconvenient._

_Rory confirmed this with a shake of her head. "No," she said firmly. "It's hard to dislike someone you haven't really met."_

That _put his ears up in a big way, but before he could ask anything else, Rory was shrugging away her discomfort with a breezy, "So, what's the deal with the crazy sculpture display?"_

_He wanted very much to pry a little more into the current Gilmore/Danes drama, but he knew Rory well enough to know that she didn't want to talk about it any more. And frankly, he was more than happy to avoid the awkward topics if there wasn't any important reason to focus on them. Luke's weirdness about his kid wasn't exactly Yale-dropout-level seriousness, after all._

Unfortunately, Jess was beginning to think that maybe it was, after all. He, of all people, should have seen the warning signs early. True, he wasn't exactly hanging out in Stars Hollow any more, but he had been talking to Luke more often since the release of _The Subsect_, and now that he was really thinking about it, some things his uncle had said during those conversations- not big things, not important, mostly just little throwaway comments- that in hindsight were incredibly telling.

He strode down the sixth-floor hallway and, acting on a combination of serendipity and instinct, banged his fist heavily on a door selected at random.

After a few moments he heard a girl's voice ask, "Who is it?"

"My name's Jess; I'm looking for someone," he said.

There was a brief hesitation and he heard the muffled but unmistakeable sounds of a whispered conference of two thirteen-year-old minds, then the door opened, stopped firmly a few inches into its swing by the security chain. A young girl peeked through the gap at him.

"Do you know where I can find Luke Danes?" Jess asked her shortly.

She shrugged. "Most of the chaperones are down at the far end of the hall," she said, her open mouth revealing bands on her braces that were as brightly colored as the ones securing the ends of her cornrows. "I don't know which room Hagrid's in, though." The door slammed shut in his face and from the other side could be heard badly-stifled giggles.

"Aaaaand that's why I hated middle school," Jess muttered under his breath. He headed in the direction the girl had indicated. His strides were long, his pace hurried. His bones were humming with pent-up urgency and determination. He felt jittery and displaced and he was pretty sure that if he hadn't had a few beers earlier, if it weren't quite so late, if he hadn't been quite _so_ convinced that Rory really was there for him tonight, he wouldn't even be here. At the same time, he knew he _had_ to be here.

He knocked on two more doors before he was finally confronted with the sight of Luke in his pajamas, looking at him in bleary confusion.

"Jess, what-?" he began, but Jess had already pushed past him.

Jess looked around the generic hotel room but he didn't really see anything. He rounded on his uncle and fixed him with a fierce stare. "You're screwing it up," he said bluntly.

"What are you talking about?" Luke asked, closing the door. "What are you doing here?"

Jess shook his head and began pacing the small room in agitation. "Dammit, Luke!" he said. "Between the two of us, you're supposed to be the one who gets it figured out and gets the girl and all that fairytale crap, you know? I'm the fuckup, okay? You're not supposed to make the same damn mistakes!"

Luke stared at him warily. "What the hell are you talking about?" Suddenly, a look of awareness crossed his face. "Is this... about Rory?"

"No!" Jess snapped, reverting for just a moment to the temperament he had possessed at seventeen, angry at the world and taking it out on Luke. Then he sighed, and said more calmly, "No, not really. Not directly. Kind of? Dammit, I..." He shook his head again, to clear it. He pointed at the bed. "Sit down. We need to talk."

Luke raised his eyebrows. "Now there's something I never thought I'd hear you say," he teased.

"Not really in a joking mood, Luke," Jess responded tersely. He pulled out the hard-backed chair that had been pushed under the desk in the corner of the room and sat down, once again indicating to the bed opposite him. Luke complied.

"Okay, let's back up a minute here," Luke said. "What are you doing here?"

Jess brought his hands up to his head, massaging his temples tiredly. He had been carried here in a fit of desperation, but now that he was here and starting to think rationally, he wasn't quite sure how to proceed. Finding the right words had never been more important, because this wasn't his own fucked up life he was playing with, it was Luke's as well, but Jess had never been good at finding the right words. When he was locked away with a pen and a notebook or his piece of shit typewriter it was easy, but on the spot, in the moment? Not so much.

"I realized something tonight," he began. "I realized that once you break a Gilmore girl's heart, she's not ever gonna forgive you."

"Jess-" Luke interrupted, a concerned look on his face.

But he wasn't going to let himself be stopped. "And you know what? That's fine. You know? I made my bed, now I guess I'll just have to lie in it. It sucks, and it hurts like hell, and I'm probably gonna be drunk for the next two weeks straight. I guess I earned that. But I will be _damned_ if I'm gonna stand by and watch the same thing happen to you."

"What are you talking about?"

Jess raised a sarcastic eyebrow. "'The woman I'm with, my fiancee, Lorelai, _you met her that one time?_'" he quoted back to Luke the conversation he had overheard earlier. "Come on, Luke. I talked to Rory, and I know Lorelai enough to know she can't possibly be happy with how... _whatever_ is."

At these words, Luke's shoulders sagged. "Rory said that?" he asked quietly.

"Not in so many words, but it was heavily implied," Jess confirmed. "I'm not an idiot. I put the pieces together. A few things Liz has said, what Rory said earlier, that little display of supreme awkwardness earlier with her and April... something's wrong."

Luke shook his head. "No! I mean, things have been weird, yeah, but it's not really..."

Jess chuckled quietly, and with absolutely no real humor behind it, staring at his clenched hands. "Yeah, that's what I thought, too," he said softly.

"What do you-?"

"Everything was fine," Jess said, eyes stormy and still fixed intently on his whitening knuckles. "That's what I kept telling myself, back then. Rory and I _were_ fine. Dean _wasn't_ a problem, even if he wanted to think he was. I was going to school _enough_. Bullshit. All of it was nothing but bullshit I kept telling myself so I wouldn't have to risk letting her see I was scared shitless."

He glanced up at his uncle. Luke was looking at him with eyes full of confusion and pity. "Jess, it's been years since-"

"I know it's been years, dammit! Don't you think I'm perfectly aware of that? That's my point!"

"What is this all about? Jess, what happened tonight?"

Jess shook his head. "What happened tonight doesn't matter. It doesn't. What does matter is, you're doing the same thing I did and you can't even see it. You know I'm right."

"Jess..." Luke said weakly.

"What the hell is going on?" Jess asked. "I mean really, not this _"April likes me, Lorelai's... fine..."_ crap you were spinning earlier."

The older man sighed. "I... things have been weird."

"Does Lorelai hate the kid or something?"

Luke snorted. "No. I mean, I don't think so. They haven't seen each other much, so she hasn't really had a chance to form much of an opinion."

Jess bit back a sharp comment about Lorelai's ability to form opinions pretty fucking fast and instead opted for asking, "Then what is it?"

His uncle looked sheepish, staring down at his shoes, resting his elbows on his knees. "I didn't... uh, I didn't tell Lorelai about April for a few months."

"Moron."

"It's just, we'd been waiting to set a wedding date because she and Rory were fighting and we didn't want to make plans while that was still going on but then Rory was back and going back to school and things were just finally getting back on track and I just... didn't want to derail things. I mean, God, we'd talked about having kids together. And suddenly I have this daughter that I didn't know about for _years_."

"And you think that would impact Lorelai wanting to have kids with you?" Jess asked, not getting it.

Luke shrugged. "What kind of a man doesn't know he has a kid for twelve years? Hell, what kind of man am I if Anna knew me as well as she used to and decided "this is a guy who shouldn't even have the option of being a dad?" Jesus, I'm amazed Lorelai didn't run screaming for the hills right then!"

The penny dropped. "Wait, are you...?" He let out a chuckle of disbelief. "Are _you_ worried about being a bad father?"

"All evidence seems to be pointing that direction, yes."

Jess snorted. "Christ, Luke! I know about deadbeat dads. _Rory_ knows about deadbeat dads. But you know what? We both had a pretty damn good surrogate. There are a lot of shitty fathers out there, but you're not one of them."

Luke looked at him with a complex expression on his face, caught somewhere between confusion and awe. Despite the intensity of this conversation, Jess found that he wasn't willing to discuss the true depths of his regard and affection for his uncle at this particular junction. It was one of the unspokens between them. The two of them were so alike, able to communicate perfectly clearly in few words. They had always done best by skirting around the edges of things, hinting at them and letting the other infer the truth from that, at least when it came to sensitive subjects. The problem for both of them, Jess now knew, was that Gilmore girls were not like that. They needed the words, and more than that, they needed the words and the actions to match.

He pressed on, "But Lorelai knows about April now, and we've established that you're a moron if you think any kid isn't damn lucky to have you as a dad, so what's the problem?"

Luke sighed. "I don't know. Everything's just so weird and forced and-"

"And you just have all this crap on your mind and you feel like if you have to think about one more thing your head's gonna explode and you know there's something wrong between you and Lorelai but you don't think it's too big a deal, except sometimes it feels like you're kissing her just to prove your relationship isn't completely going to shit?"

His uncles eyes widened noticeably, and Jess knew he'd hit it on the head. "How did you-?"

"You and I... we're cut from the same cloth. We're a lot more alike than either of us would like to admit out loud. We react the same way to stuff," Jess explained wryly. "And let me tell you from experience that shutting her out is not gonna fix a damn thing. It's too easy to just stick our heads in the sand and pretend there isn't a problem. Trouble with that is that eventually it blows up in your face. And I don't know what your version of splitting for California will be, but trust me, in the long run it's not worth it."

And just like that, Jess could see he'd touched just the right nerve that Luke wouldn't be able to just push this away and pretend their conversation hadn't happened. If Jess were the kind of person to make to-do lists, he would have been able to put a check mark next to "Knock Sense Into Moron Uncle." He'd fixed it. Well, no, he hadn't fixed a damn thing, but maybe he'd given Luke the wake-up call he needed to do the fixing. After all, it was Luke who was the fixer, not him. He could take it from here.

"I'm... gonna go," he said, standing up abruptly. "I've gotta go... I dunno, drink my weight in whiskey or something."

"Jess..." Luke said quietly, getting to his feet, looking deeply worried.

Jess offered him what even he knew was a pathetic estimation of a reassuring smile. "No, I'll be fine. Just... confronting reality sucks. But it's something we've all got to do sooner or later." He frowned thoughtfully. "Maybe there's a book in that." He filed away the idea, the budding plot that had suddenly taken root, and shook his head. "Just think about what I said, Luke. Hindsight is 20/20, ya know?"

Luke nodded solemnly, and Jess took a minute to fix that image of his uncle in his mind, a perfect picture of a man who still had a chance to save himself if he would only take the time. Then he turned and all but fled from the hotel room.

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><p><strong>AN part deux-** I would just like to say that **everyone needs to leave this page RIGHT NOW and go listen to Vienna Teng's "Unwritten Letter No. 1"** because this is precisely how I have always envisioned Lorelai's pre-LWFTWT feelings for Luke (particularly the lines "bent so close we nearly kiss/although we never will" and "you gave me truth/I chose illusion"). Just... go listen to it. Then come back and review. It'll still be here, I promise.


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